What's the Big Idea? - pt. 4

Answers

Last night I saw my old playwriting teacher in a dream. He stood on a plinth in the midst of a desert of white sand as panelists from AWP crept past him on their hands and knees. Some of these he allowed to pass; others he incinerated with a single glance, sizzling them where they lay with blue-white thunderbolts from his eyes.

“Professor,” I called to him, “I believe I’m beginning to understand. Story is about a character encountering obstacles on the way toward a goal. Isn’t it?”

He did not reply. In the distance, I saw a great sleuth of bears roaming over the dunes toward the handful of panelists who had survived.

 Oh shit.

When I say the writer must answer the question, “What is this book about?” what do I mean, and how do I expect him to do it? I certainly don’t consider it easy. If telling stories were easy, my copies of Poets & Writers wouldn’t be all tearstained and covered with rings from the bottoms of pint glasses. But I do think there are certain things to look for, and certain danger signs to avoid.

A good way to start is to think about goals and obstacles for a character. Because I am obsessed with clowns, let’s start there. Most clown routines are predicated on a goal/obstacle relationship. Take this scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus:

Chaplin’s goal in the scene is to get from one end of the tightrope to the other (to impress a girl, but that’s not important for our purposes here). His obstacle? Monkeys. Monkeys who pull down his pants. Chaplin manages to get past the obstacle to his goal; he also could have definitively failed by falling off the tightrope or being rescued by someone else. But either way, there’s a clear source of tension, because we know what’s at stake, and there’s a natural point at which that tension is resolved. 

Many writers understand this goal/obstacle relationship when it comes to short stories, but somehow, the novel seems like a different thing entirely. In the early stages of composition, a novel can feel like an endless expanse, the bottomless void of outer space in which even the most basic natural laws no longer apply. I get this. Part of what’s exhilarating for me about writing book-length fiction is the initial feeling that I’ll never run out: of new facets in my characters, of new places in the book’s world to discover, of thematic material, which seems to glimmer self-evidently everywhere I turn my authorial gaze. 

Whittling all this down to a handful of central goal/obstacle relationships seems about as impossible and pointless as carving a redwood down to a toothpick. Yet when I look at fiction that succeeds in holding my attention, I find almost invariably that this is what the writer has sneakily managed to do. 

Consider Jonathan Franzen’s overreaching doorstop FREEDOM. By rights, this novel should suck the big one. It’s chock full of sentimentality, intellectually lazy politics, and incompetently managed narration (Franzen, just admit that Patty did not write that section, you goddamn liar). Yet Franzen makes it work through the oldest trick there is: thwarted romance. Everybody in this book wants somebody else in the book, and in every case, there is a major obstacle in the way of the relationship working out. Lalitha wants her boss Walter, who loves his wife Patty, who wants to bone his best friend Richard, who is Not Good Relationship Material. Meanwhile, Walter and Patty’s son Joey wants to have hot meaningless sex with conservative coeds but he’s hindered by his abiding love for Connie, his girl back home. 

These characters have goals as obvious as the straight line a tightrope makes above the rings of a circus, and though some of their obstacles come from internal sources (guilt, being a douchebag), they’re not a hell of a lot more complicated than those adorable cheeky monkeys. It’s this very simplicity that makes the book a page turner in spite of itself. Because we know what each character is after, we know when to say, “Oh no!” or “Whew, close one!”

I’m using the words “goal/obstacle relationship” rather than “conflict,” because I think that the word “conflict,” especially when applied to character’s internal thought processes, has been corrupted to the point of total meaninglessness. In common parlance, a character can be “conflicted” about just about anything – his identity, his relationship to his family or heritage, his past life choices. But this “conflict” does not relate to story unless it poses an obstacle to action in the novel’s present day – unless it gets in the way.

Kazuo Ishiguro is the king of this particular goal/obstacle relationship. His characters’ obstacles are almost always* psychological, of their own making, but daunting and impassable just the same. The obstacle in the way of an Ishiguro character’s true goal is usually a kind of competing goal, a desire to fulfill a duty. The butler can’t allow himself to experience love because he believes being a butler should always come first. The clones can’t run away and find happiness because they believe they should do what they’re “supposed to” and give up their internal organs. The detective can’t be with his lady until he finds out what became of his parents.

However, the form this kind of story often takes in lesser hands is something along the lines of “…and it fucks him up.” As in, “This character was abused as a child, and it fucks him up.” Or, “This character always wonders what happened to his murdered sister, and it fucks him up.” The particular “conflict” doesn’t specifically obstruct the present action, mentally tying the character’s hands and preventing him from reaching a goal. Instead, it makes the character sad :-(

Let me just say this once, writers of America. SAD CHARACTERS ARE NOT DRAMA.

...next up: making connections

OR... back to: what's a query for, anyway?  AND the art of the pitch?? AND literary rebellions & literary excuse-making

 
*This is even arguably the case in his masterpiece The Unconsoled, but here the psychological obstacles are literalized into the dreamscape the narrator navigates throughout.

A Good Book Is Hard to Find

When I recently posted about Pamela Paul's NY Times article "The Kids' Books Are All Right," I promised that I would return to something that intrigued me at the time: Lev Grossman's statement that more grown-ups, including himself, are reading YA because, "a lot of contemporary adult literature is characterized by a real distrust of plot... I think young adult fiction is one of the few areas of literature right now where storytelling really thrives."  It's an honest statement and perhaps even an accurate one, but there's something odd in it too.  The implication here isn't that YA is giving readers something new, but that adult literature is shirking its duties.  It's a consumer's mentality.  Give the people what they want, he seems to be saying, or they'll (rightly) take their business elsewhere.

At first glance, it seems like Lev Grossman is an odd person to be saying that.  For one thing, he's a contemporary novelist himself, the author of three books for adults (most recently The Magicians, which I adored and loathed in near-equal measure); for another, he's a literary critic.  Recently he got a bit more spotlight than usual, when he did the unthinkable by landing an unabashedly serious novelist – Jonathan Franzen – face first on the cover of Time.  Inside the magazine, Grossman says the Franz "is a member of a perennially threatened species, the American literary novelist... [and] I would argue — that he is the most ambitious and also one of the best."  Later, he praises Freedom by saying, "It doesn't back down from the complexity [of modern American life]."  Yet, despite Grossman's admiration for "ambition" and "complexity" and his apparent awareness that forces in our culture exist to threaten the works of literature that display them, here he extols the superior curb appeal of kiddie lit to adult readers.  What gives?

Some of the answers can perhaps be found in his obnoxiously titled Wall Street Journal piece "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard" (brought to my attention by alert reader John).  Go ahead and click the link, but be forewarned: qua essay, it's awful, lumping together disparate writers like Kafka, Hemingway, and Proust under the single heading "Modernism," then simplifying their aesthetics to the point of moronic absurdity.  "To the Modernists, stories were a distortion of real life. In real life stories don't tie up neatly... Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world."  As much as I love the mental image of Virginia Woolf screaming, "You can't handle the truth!" Jack Nicholson-style, I have to point out that shit like this wouldn't fly in a tenth-grader's term paper. 

And it goes downhill from there.  Grossman reaches a nadir of substance when he writes, "There was a time when difficult literature was exciting... But in contemporary writers it has just become a drag," then attempts to "prove" his "point" purely through statistics from Bookscan, without making a single statement about the form, content, diction, or aims of any contemporary novel.  If Grossman's only standard for a book's success is how much money it made the year it was published, he might need to reconsider his opinion of some of those beloved Modernist texts, not to mention his own career as a book critic, which, according to his own logic, was made obsolete by the invention of the adding machine.  Yet, despite the hamhanded anti-intellectualism and flat-out rhetorical laziness of the piece, there's an observation hidden in it that I found pretty interesting.

"Writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Richard Price, Kate Atkinson, Neil Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke, to name just a few, are busily grafting the sophisticated, intensely aware literary language of Modernism onto the sturdy narrative roots of genre fiction: fantasy, science fiction, detective fiction, romance," Grossman writes.  "They're forging connections between literary spheres that have been hermetically sealed off from one another for a century."  Unlike the Modernists of old and the unnamed "difficult" writers working today, these authors, he argues, are striking "compromises with the public taste," using humor and suspense and, he implies, sometimes intoxicatingly sniffable glue bindings to keep readers crawling back for more.  With this new postmodernism – the postmodernism of fun, fun, fun! – "the balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader," he concludes.

There's something to what Grossman is saying here.  Going back to Barthelme and Vonnegut there have been postmodernists who have slung their weird capes over the dress dummies of genre.  But we're currently seeing a proliferation of them.  And a few of these wackos are brilliant enough to see by in the dark – in my personal estimation, so good it hurts.  But why are they so good?  Is it because, as Grossman claims, they're caving to the pressure of the marketplace – because they've observed that book sales are on the decline and they've decided to roll up their sleeves and pitch in?  One morning, did Kelly Link sit up in bed and say to herself, "Okay, Barnes & Noble shoppers, you win: I'm chucking my stream-of-consciousness novel of marital ennui.  From now on it's all zombies, all the time"?

Maybe she did: I don't know the chick.  But I do know her work, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say I don't think it's the result of a series of "compromises with the public taste."  I don't think it compromises at all.  And, although her writing is certainly accessible, I don't think that her story collections (which, I'd imagine, do not Bookscan in the millions) are great because of their widespread appeal, or, to put it more bluntly, their sales.  I think they're great for the same reasons Grossman calls Franzen's work great: because they don't shy away from the complexity that they present.  Because, although they're small in scale, they're imaginatively, aesthetically, thematically ambitious.  Because – and this is something Grossman doesn't quite say – the form and content are of a piece, neither artificially imposed on the other.

In "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard," Grossman's fatal mistake is, I think, overlooking that last point.  He seems to think that the form of a novel can be "compromised," made palatable to readers, without altering the content.  But I don't think Kelly Link's zombies, or Chabon's comic book superheroes, or Lethem's gumshoes, or Clarke's magicians (or Grossman's magicians, for that matter), are just a concession, something tossed in to keep antsy readers placated and entertained.  I don't think they could be swapped out and replaced with something trendier (OMG vampires!!1) without some intrinsic meaning being lost.  These authors aren't Jerry Seinfeld's wife, disguising the vegetables of literary merit inside the junk food appearance of genre.  Genre is part of their work's DNA, its birthright, part of what it wrestles with and makes sense of – it's no more arbitrary or extraneous to their books than middle-class American pseudo-realism is to Franzen's.  The forms these authors use aren't impressive because they hide the content; they're impressive because they're inextricable from it.

 Thank God the new postmodernism doesn't leave kale stuck to the back of your throat.

And, in the same way, if a "difficult" book succeeds as art, it's not because we have decided "pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience," as Grossman says (there's his consumer's mentality again); it's not because we're willing to strain our eyes peering through the clouded lens of difficulty to glimpse the work's true subject.  It's because that particular difficulty is part of the work's subject, and not in a vague, general, and therefore uninteresting way ("The Modernists' idea was life is, like, way complicated, y'know?"), but in a way that's concretely, specifically tied to the unique vision of that novel.

Which raises the question: what is this "difficulty" that Grossman and I keep referring to oh-so-vaguely, without providing any examples?  The flip response, which is also partly true, is that there are as many different kinds of difficulty as there are readers, since different things are tough or unfamiliar or simply disagreeable to different people.  But in my next post, I'm actually going to talk about what I think makes certain pieces of fiction difficult for me, and why.

Being Difficult

Back in 2002, Jonathan Franzen took a lot of flak for an essay he wrote for the New Yorker, entitled "Mr. Difficult."  It was, in part, about the works of William Gaddis and the changing relationship Franzen had to those works over the course of his life – and about the conclusion he ultimately arrived at, that at heart Gaddis's writing (after The Recognitions) coldly and unrealistically demands that readers "renounce the sinful pleasures of Realism and cultivate a selfless and pure love of Art."  Franzen writes that he believes there is no person in the world, not even Gaddis himself, who would rather read JR than watch The Simpsons, and concludes, "To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself... this violates what seems to me to be the categorical imperative for any fiction writer." 

Numerous writers, perhaps most notably Ben Marcus in a lengthy Harper's take-down, weighed in on this piece, many denouncing what they perceived to be Franzen's weird anti-intellectualism (an anti-intellectualism that was expressed in an impassioned and pages-long discussion of the entire oeuvre of a notoriously challenging and cerebral author, addressed to the readers of the New Yorker).  Had I been blogging at the time, I no doubt would have joined their chorus: there's something off-putting about Franzen's tone throughout the piece, something uncomfortable about the assumptions he makes of his reader, as if on a first date some dude reached across the coffee shop table to straighten the strap of your bra.  "The work of reading Gaddis makes me wonder if our brains might even be hard-wired for conventional storytelling, structurally eager to form pictures from sentences as featureless as 'She stood up,'" he offers in an aside.  To which I'd be inclined to reply, "You don't know the first thing about my brain, 'Mr. Chomsky' – and I'd advise you to keep your hands to yourself." 

And yet, I've thought about that essay many, many times over the years, because in a certain way, I know he's right.  Not about Gaddis, necessarily (I've only read A Frolic of His Own, which I actually thought was a hoot), but about the subjective experience of difficulty, which few critics or essayists really ever discuss. 

Part of what makes reading fiction intense and passionate for me is the fact that it's personal, immersive, one-on-one: that when I am deep inside a book, it's as though I have the author all to myself.  The observations he makes feel almost like they come from inside my own consciousness; the characters' faces and mannerisms, their inflection, are supplied by me from the storehouse of my own experience.  Yet the flip side of that is that when I'm reading and I get confused, lost, I'm in that all alone too. 

In the time I've lived in New York, I've become adept at noticing the exact moment in my interaction with another person when I realize she's insane – actually, certifiably insane.  It happens more often than you'd think.  Once I was at the post office, waiting in an epic line, and the woman behind me and I were commiserating. 

"But you're shipping that domestically," I suddenly observed, noticing she held a Priority Mail envelope.  "You can just use one of the automated machines for that, you don't have to wait here." 

"Oh, I can't do that," she explained.  "Then the government would have my credit card information and they'd track everything I do."

Shields go up when I realize I'm speaking to someone I don't, can't understand.  When I'm reading a book, and it becomes difficult – really thwartingly, incomprehensibly difficult – shields go up, albeit slightly different ones.  Because the thing is, no matter how daunting and impenetrable I find a text, I basically assume that the person writing it is capable of communicating in a straightforward human way.  The fact that they're not, that they're choosing to be opaque, to talk crazy without being it, generally summons in me some knee-jerk feelings of resentment: feelings that are often dispelled by some purpose revealed later in the work, but that well up nevertheless.

"There is nothing like the headache you get from working harder on deciphering a text than the author, by all appearances, has worked on assembling it," Franzen writes. I've had that headache quite a few times myself. And yet only rarely do you see that experience acknowledged or talked about in the (rare) reviews of serious avant-garde fiction. In large part, people prefer to vaguely praise, vaguely criticize, or simply avoid writing about these books at all.  The difficulty – which might be the first (and last) thing many readers take away from their experience of the work – is ignored, making anyone who attempted to read the book feel even stupider, even more resentful, even more alone in his experience of what seemed like the writer's hostility to him, the wall going up on every page. 

There's a Kids in the Hall sketch where Kevin McDonald and Dave Foley play two businessmen meeting for the first time at an office party.  A coworker introduces them, then leaves them alone together.  McDonald tries again and again to engage Dave Foley in conversation, but Foley simply stands there and smiles (the man has an eerie, Cheshire-cat like smile).  When the coworker returns, Foley immediately speaks up and tells him horrible lies about McDonald – I think he calls him a bedwetter.  For many readers who are not writers themselves, this must be the experience, in a nutshell, of taking on one of the more "difficult" writers working today.  You try to engage with this author, you work hard to connect with him, and then as soon as someone else shows up, he makes you feel like an idiot.

The face of contemporary difficult fiction?

But why is it that we seldom talk about difficulty – that we so frequently exclude it from the conversations we have about books?  One reason, the most obvious, is that no one wants to sound like an idiot, even if he feels like one.  But another, equally strong reason is that there's a perception (and not an unfounded one) in the contemporary writing community that our art form is dying, and that it's time to circle the wagons to protect our own.  The very worst thing to say is that a book is so tough to get through that even another professional writer had to struggle mightily to keep turning the pages.

I have a friend who occasionally writes poetry reviews for an online journal.  The editor of this journal told my friend, in so many words, that they do not publish negative reviews, not of any book, ever.  The Believer takes a similar tack, and I'm sure they're not alone.  The idea behind this behavior is of course that negative reviews discourage book sales, and no one wants that – better that readers should approach a work with inflated expectations than not approach it at all.  But I would imagine that the actual result of this is not that "average" (i.e., not professional) readers read more literary books – it's that they don't read literary books or the publications that review them.  They feel excluded from the conversation, and so they leave it entirely.

To a certain extent, this can't be helped.  The fact is, some people eventually lose interest in reading anything with more substance than an InStyle article.  I call these people "Philistines," but to each his own. (There are plenty of art forms I know fuck all about myself – architecture, modern dance – so clearly I'm throwing stones from the roof of a greenhouse.)  But what makes me sad are the people who still have a craving for fiction, but seek out and read only kids' books or trash.

Which brings me back, in a long way, to the subject of my last post.  I think there's something to what Lev Grossman said in in the otherwise heinous Pamela Paul NY Times article "The Kids' Books Are All Right," about the way that YA fiction allows plot to thrive, and I'm going to ponder that more when I write on here next.  But one thing that I feel sure YA fiction offers people is the feeling that they are qualified to take part in a conversation about it, that they won't embarrass themselves like poor Kevin McDonald.  And to me, the fact that things have come to that pass is something that should make all of us feel pretty stupid.